It’s the end of an era tonight in Akron as the Zips play the Buffalo Bulls in the last Zips football game ever to be played in the historic Rubber Bowl. Next year, Akron will play in shiny new Infocision Stadium. Summa Field at Infocision Stadium to be more precise. (How much did Rubber pay to have a Bowl named after it?)
When we went to the Rubber Bowl as kids, either to go to a Zips game, a high school football game, the Soap Box Derby, to see the Goodyear Blimps, or to get a cone or float at Strickland’s, we knew we were someplace special. The big old stadium carved into a hill that provided a backdrop to the airfield. And there was the Derby track. And the Hangar itself: “Once the world’s largest structure without internal supports. This engineering wonder cover(s) more than eight acres (about ten football fields) and (is) so huge that occasionally moist condense(s) and it “rain(s)” inside the structure.”*
It was the hills of Akron, along with the fresh water sources in those hills, that caused the City to be built in the first place — as a crucial point on the route of the Ohio/Erie canal that connected the Ohio River to Lake Erie, thus connecting the Hudson River with the Port of New Orleans. The canal had to be built here because, “[c]anals can only go where natural watercourses are available to keep the channels full.”**
Of course, now that canal is a lot less important. Just like the Rubber Bowl itself; the rubber companies; and definitely the blimps.*** (Summa: health care provider. Infocision: “the highest quality inbound and outbound teleservices.”)
The Pick (Five Times): Akron Zips -2 over Buffalo Bulls.
*George W. Knepper, “Ohio and Its People” pg. 362, (2d ed. 1997).
**Knepper at pg. 151
